Cleaning up ‘Methadone Mile’ and other drug havens
BOSTON — A young woman crouches on a dusty strip of grass alongside a busy Boston thoroughfare and plunges a needle into her arm. Around the corner, a couple stands zombie-like in the middle of the sidewalk, oblivious to passing pedestrians on a muggy morning.
Farther down the road, a man injects heroin into another man’s hand beside a gas station convenience store.
“It’s hard to be out here and not be high, you know,” said Jamie Allison, a 36-year-old woman with telltale black needle marks on her arms, shrugging as she took in the milieu from her curbside perch. “You need something just to get through the day.”
This is “Methadone Mile,” a stretch of Massachusetts Avenue south of downtown where methadone clinics, sober homes and other drug treatment services have grown in the shadow of Boston Medical Center, New England’s busiest trauma hospital. It’s an area meant for healing that has instead become the city’s most visible symbol of the national opioid crisis.